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  Most of the days were spent in and around the huts. Dome-shaped, the height of a tall man in the centre, criss-crossed with sticks and covered with several mats made from long grass, they were snug and watertight. To enter, the children had to bend double, while the adults crawled through on their bellies. Skirts and beads and the kilts of the men were piled onto platforms on one side, but there was no furniture and they slept flat on the hard ground, on mats of cypress.

  At first the food made Sara nauseous, and she could only sit and watch as they ate, sometimes holding a whole sheep’s stomach with its contents, bending over, tearing at it all together. At other times great wooden bowls of animal fat would be placed before them, together with boiled ribs, millet porridge, kidney beans and calabashes of sour milk. Hunger soon overcame Sara’s aversion, and she ate. Stolidly, Anna Maria ate by her side. But Christiaan refused everything, and day by day he grew weaker and paler. Sometimes Sara would hold his head and force some thick milk between his lips. The women fussed around him and smeared dried blood on his stomach and the boiled juice of leaves on his forehead, but Christiaan would neither talk nor swallow. Eyes sunken, cheeks hollow, little legs shrivelled, he just lay. His heart was broken and he was alive only in that he still breathed.

  Although they did not see him, Sara remained very afraid of the king, for she clearly remembered the words of her father. ‘The Matabele are a powerful people,’ he had said. ‘We shall keep away from them for they are ruthless fighters and may not realise that we come in peace.’

  So Sara remained very much in awe of Mzilikazi, but as she knew only kindness from the women, she could not remain afraid of them for long.

  Her favourite was Mahlega, The One Who Laughs. She was the one who woke them in the mornings and took them down to the river to bathe with the other women and girls. Holding their hands tightly, Mahlega would splash and frolic with them in the cold, shallow pools. Unlike the older women, her body was still young and firm and Sara loved to watch her standing, quite naked, with the clear, sun-pricked drops sliding down her body. It was the colour of tobacco, a rich, burnished brown. The great wives of Mzilikazi took baths too, snorting and puffing, their flesh hanging loosely in soft folds, their beads glinting in the early morning sun. At first little Christiaan would also join them, but after a few days he was too weak and they had to leave him lying on his mat in the hut.

  After bathing, Mahlega would rub their legs with a pink-tinted cream made from powdered clay, then she would help them wash their clothes, spreading them out on the bushes to dry. They had no linen kappies with them, no long print dresses, for they had been captured in their nightclothes, rather tattered now, drawn in at the neck and wrists with faded blue ribbon. And while these dried, they ran naked but for strings of beads which Mahlega hung round their necks. Each day their pale limbs grew browner, their stomachs filled out with maize and mabela, pumpkins and fatty meat. Yet they were often bewildered and unhappy, and Anna Maria cried a great deal.

  ‘Never mind,’ Sara would try to comfort her. ‘Soon Papa will come galloping up on Pronk to fetch us and take all three of us back again to the wagons at the river.’ Yet even as she spoke she knew, with childish instinct, that their Papa would never come. For the thing they had so often heard the men speak about, the thing the grown-ups had discussed only in lowered voices, when they thought the children were asleep, this thing had happened. The Matabele had come upon them and massacred their party.

  During the day, Mahlega would take the girls to the fields with her. Here they sat in the shade of a tree and watched her hoeing the soil with the collar bone of an ox, in and out, over and over, until the midday sun burnt directly overhead. Then it was time to return to the harem, the isigodhlo, to clean the pots, cook some beans, perhaps, prepare a calabash of amasi, or weave new grass mats for them to sleep on.

  In all this time they saw Mzilikazi only once. He sent for them one morning, when they returned from the river. Sara had to carry Christiaan, for he was too weak to walk. Mahlega went with them, dropping to her knees as they approached her lord and master. He wore the same blue beads round his neck, the same green feathers on his head; in his hand a calabash of beer, at his feet a bowl of red meat. At his side stood Mkalipi, the warrior who had captured Sara. She shrank when she saw him, for she remembered that face behind the assegaai, the huge feet planted on either side of her head. But Mahlega whispered soft, comforting words in her ear, and the king did not speak to them at all. Instead, he held a discussion with Mkalipi, speaking in his high-pitched voice, pointing from one child to the other.

  ‘Soon I shall be visited by the white man, the hunter Captain Cornwallis Harris. It would be best if I get these white children out of the way before he comes. They are of his kind, and he will take them back.’

  It wasn’t that Mzilikazi was at all interested in the white children, but his favourite, Mkalipi, was. ‘You want those little white lizards?’ the king cried in astonishment. ‘Those pale, thin sheep? You will be laughed at, Mkalipi! Come, let us cut off their heads and choose you two wives of whom you can be proud, who will bear you fine sons and and give you comfort and delight.’ The induna shook his head. ‘I will take other wives to bear me sons. But when these little sheep grow older, they will be able to teach me many things. They will share with me the knowledge of their fathers, and I shall be wise.’ The king nodded thoughtfully and then, after several minutes, motioned to Mahlega to take them away.

  One morning, soon after their summons by the king, Mahlega rushed into the hut, shook them awake and hustled them outside. There stood a young, pale-skinned man. ‘Willem,’ Mahlega said, pointing.

  ‘Griqua.’ Then she dashed inside and emerged with their rolled-up mats. To Sara’s astonishment, the man Willem spoke to her in her own language. Broken and halting, but perfectly understandable. He had been part of a group of Griqua hunters who had slipped over the Orange. Most of them had been caught and killed by Mkalipi’s warriors but, sensing that Willem might be useful in some way, his life had been spared. He was brought to live with the Matabele, and destined to become one of their headmen.

  Now he told Sara that, on the instruction of the king, they were being sent to another kraal, to be looked after by Nyumbakazi, one of his wives who was childless. ‘She has never had a child round her legs,’ the king had said. ‘She will be gentle with them and give them food and a mother’s love.’ Mahlega would accompany them. ‘And Christiaan? We can’t leave Christiaan!’ Sara cried. ‘He will follow later,’ said Willem. ‘The king will send him when he is stronger.’

  Sara bit her lip and the tears rolled down her sunburned cheeks. She was unhappy and very afraid, she did not know where they were being taken, and the bushes were already cutting her feet.

  It was an uneventful journey lasting seven days. Stolidly the little convoy made its way over the veld, sleeping by night beside a huge fire tended by Willem, to ward off any hungry leopards and lions.

  By day they wove a path between the karee and mimosa trees, through the long spring green grass, keeping a sharp look-out for wild boars and buffaloes and hidden, deadly snakes. When their calabashes of amasi were empty, they drank at water holes, and Willem caught partridges and guinea fowl for them to eat, expertly breaking their necks like brittle sticks.

  Stoically the little girls plodded on, their senses dulled through sheer exhaustion. To encourage them, Mahlega took out a surprise which she had kept hidden inside her sleeping mat: two small leather aprons, brightly decorated with beads. Pulling off their old, torn nightdresses, she slipped the little skirts, which she had spent many secret hours making, over their slender hips. Now they walked more confortably, and by the time they reached the kraal, their destination, their bodies were deeply browned and streaked with dust.

  Nyumbakazi, their new mother, chuckled and fussed over them. Being childless, she was delighted to have two children to care for, and honoured by the king’s decision to leave them in her care. If any harm befell them, he
r head would be cut off. So she cuddled them and fed them and chattered to them endlessly.

  Quite soon, with both Nyumbakazi and Mahlega speaking to the children in their tribal tongue, they were fast learning to follow and even repeat certain short sentences. Sara found, too, that she was becoming used to sleeping on the ground; used to the taste of sour milk, greasy beans and thick millet porridge cooked in suet. But the sight of the paunch and fat of a beast, cooked together, unwashed, looking and smelling like dung, still made her stomach heave.

  Soon, too, their bodies were burnt nut-brown and their fair hair was bleached white. It hung down their backs in two long ropes, tied by Mahlega with thin strips of soft leather. Their days were spent in gentle play and simple tasks, such as sweeping the floor of the hut with a reed broom, weaving sleeping mats and small baskets under Mahlega’s guidance, helping to clear away the chaff on the threshing floor and then screaming with frightened delight when they flushed out mice from beneath the sheaves.

  Gradually summer turned to autumn and the nights grew sharp and frosty. Sara and Anna Maria played at breathing out little white puffs of hot breath, seeing which one floated the furthest. ‘I shall make you a kaross,’ said Nyumbakazi. ‘One for you, Sara, and one for the little one. See how it is done.’

  First she put two leopard skins into the river overnight. Next day she washed them thoroughly, then laid them underneath the dung in the cattle kraal. When they were good and soft, she gave them a hard beating with a wooden mallet, another good wash, and then they were ready to use. The girls found them warm and comforting and seldom went without them. They spent much of their time now round the cosy fires, helping with the cooking, or just playing in sunny corners beside the walls of the huts, using bones and sticks as toys. They were well loved and well cared for, and slowly the painful, sharp edges of the past few months softened. The longing for their parents and the anguish of being lost and afraid was slowly, very slowly, receding.

  Only the thought of Christiaan now tugged constantly at Sara’s emotions. When she asked Mahlega about him, she just shook her head. Each day Sara spent a long while gazing at the scrubby horizon, hoping to see Willem appear with a small boy trotting by his side. But they never came. ‘Perhaps they’re waiting for the summer,’ she told herself. ‘After the rains.’

  The rains came in October that year; strong, soaking rains that softened the earth in the fertile valley. And it was in the middle of the exciting, busy planting and tilling season that the Boers attacked.

  It was very early one morning in November l837. Sara was awake, staring heavy-eyed at the dying fire, seeking patterns in the embers, beasts in the spluttering, worn-out flames.

  Then she sat up with a start. That was a shot! That was a gun! A thought flashed through her mind and left her breathless with the devastating impact – like a hard, physical blow. Perhaps her Papa had come to fetch her! He had found her, found them both at last! But just as quickly as it had surfaced, the thought died. Because she knew, had he been alive, he would have come long ago. She knew – had known all along – that he was killed that morning on the banks of the river. Killed by the thrust of an assegaai, like her mother and her baby brother. She had known this all along, but had pretended, twisting her daydreams, wringing them out of a bleak, dead knowledge. She did not even realise that she had accepted the brutal fact.

  Now someone was firing a gun and Sara crawled to the opening of the hut and peered out. Outside all was confusion. Shouting and screaming, dazed, naked Matabele were pouring out of their huts. Some had had time to grab their assegais, others were simply running in terrified circles, trying to avoid the blasts of gunfire. On the ground men groaned and rolled in pain and the women screamed and, grabbing their children, fled into the bushes and forest on the hills above. Sara found herself being roughly wrapped in her kaross and flung across the back of a strong youth. Another grabbed Anna Maria. Like goats the men took off, up the hill, leaping from rock to rock, ducking and weaving until the children were eventually put down at the summit of a small hill.

  Sara looked down. The scene was one of complete devastation. Once the commando had failed to find the small Boer children, they had set fire to the huts and granaries. The air was thick with the acrid smell of gunpowder and smoke, and the village blazed like a mountain exploded.

  Now the male warriors came scrambling up the hillside, fleeing before the bullets, against which their spears were useless. Frenziedly they herded the women and children together. ‘Go!’ they shouted. ‘Go forward – to the north! We must flee!’

  Sara took Anna Maria by the hand and followed, half-walking, half-running, not stopping to think that she was running away from her own people. Sara did not know that the Boer expedition was being led by Hendrik Potgieter, and that their chief aim was to find the Liebenberg children. She only knew that the smell of sweat and blood and gunpowder had triggered a half-buried memory; a slumbering, vicious nightmare. Screaming then, screaming and crying and calling, neither knowing nor caring, Sara ran away with the rest of the Matabele.

  This routing was not the only humiliating defeat for the Matabele. There was Vegkop, when six thousand warriors surrounded a laager of just fifty Boer wagons. They crouched in the long grass all night, rattling their shields, slaughtering some oxen for food, rubbing their assegais in the blood. They knew that the Boers were watching them, knew that they must be very afraid. And then suddenly, as the sun rose, a handful of Boer men and boys rode out to meet them. A coloured man, acting as interpreter, addressed the Matabele. My master asks you,’ he shouted, ‘why you have come here today. Do you come to kill them? To steal their cattle? What harm have they done you that you should come upon them like this with your war cries and assegais and stabbing spears?’ His words carried far on the clear morning air.

  In answer, the Matabele regiments rose as one man. ‘Mzilikazi!’ they screamed, at the same time hurtling forward in a furious, pounding wave. With each step they took, they struck their knees on the insides of their shields, while with the other they stamped heavily on the ground, and the noise filled the skies like the ominous roll of thunder.

  The Boers turned, and the wagons swallowed them up. The firing started, the guns tearing chasms in the enemy ranks, but still the Matabele came. When they reached the wagons they tried to pull them apart with their bare hands, but the wagons were chained together, the spaces between packed tightly with thorn bushes. It was a devastating battle but in the end Mkalipi signalled his warriors to leave, taking with them thousands of heads of cattle and sheep. These would offer some compensation when faced with their king’s wrath.

  The shining Matabele sun, it seemed, was on the wane. Vegkop, two attacks on Mosega, and a surprise attack by Dingaan which wiped out Mzilikazi’s famous Guinea Fowl Regiment. His clever strategies were not working any longer. He knew instinctively that the next attack would be on eGabeni, his kraal, the last stronghold.

  He worked out an extraordinary plan of action in which his warriors would hide behind a herd of cattle, and then goad them into stampeding right over the enemy, tearing them apart with their hooves and their horns. The plan could not fail. It did. And so the Matabele fled. Early in 1838, disheartened and beaten, the entire nation migrated northwards, moving slowly in the direction of the great Limpopo River.

  They split into two streams – the old men, women and children went ahead, led by Gudwani Ndwini. They were followed by the king, leading his unhappy army with Maggekeni Sithole as the leading induna. Holding Anna Maria by the hand, Sara slipped and stumbled over the sharp rocks on the mountain. She did not fully comprehend the reason behind the flight, but Mahlega and Nyumbakazi were going, and that was reason enough for her to follow. The motherly black women were the only symbols of security in her troubled world, and she now trotted obediently along with the other children.

  Day after day, week after week, the march continued. Although they had started off at the height of the rainy season, often trudging through ankle-
deep mud and pouring rain, having to be carried across swollen rivers on the backs of the warriors and sleeping at night on mounds of sodden grass, now there was no rain. There was nothing but the burning sun beating down relentlessly on the stream of refugees crossing the bushveld.

  One scorching day followed another. As a nation, they were terrified of the dark; travelling in the cool of the evening was unthinkable. When the sun set they would lie down to sleep behind rocks, or in flimsy shelters, made of poles and swathes of grass. And when the first rays of the sun flooded the veld, when the earth began to bake and crackle after the brief respite of the night, they would rise and set off again.

  Their calabashes of meal had long since been emptied; their cattle were thin and there was little milk; they subsisted mainly on roots and berries, sucking out the juices to ease their thirst.

  Slowly the column moved north-east towards the Zoutpansberg mountains. They marched in silence, shuffling without energy or spirit, fatigued and ill. Then the old people and the children started dying. Sometimes they simply fell back and lay down, too weak even to seek the shade of a camelthorn bush. Sometimes they simply did not get up in the morning. And if the others protested at leaving them behind, one of the warriors – the Amnyama Makanda – would move in and club them to death.

  Sara, now very weak and thin, floundered on. Her oxhide skirt was torn and filthy, her bright beads long since broken and lost, her entire body covered in thick dust. Flies crawled round her nose and mouth and listlessly she fanned them away. Anna Maria was dying and she knew it. She had never been as sturdy as Sara and once dysentery struck, she had no reserves. Her face grew pinched and her fever rose. Her ribs protruded and the water poured down her legs. They had long ago lost Mahlega. Then late one afternoon Anna Maria fell down, and did not respond to Sara’s pleas to try and rise. Nyumbakazi squatted down beside her and waved Sara on. When Sara refused to move, a young soldier came up and Nyumbakazi spoke to him rapidly. Lifting his club high over his head, he lunged forward on one leg and brought the club down onto a bush. The dry branches split and spat their dead foliage onto the ground. ‘Forward!’ he commanded Sara. ‘Forward!’ And he brought the club down again, this time nearer to where she was standing.